Pregnant by Incest -- an Irish Girl's Dilemma

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 11, 1997

DOWN BY THE RIVER

To understand modern Ireland, we need more than a good grasp of the political troubles that have beset the island for centuries.

The battle for the republic's soul has been fought on other terrain during our lifetime, as on the question of obedience to the Catholic Church in such matters as divorce and abortion.

The distinguished Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, author of the "Country Girls" trilogy and most recently "House of Splendid Isolation," lives in London but has hardly severed a thread of her richly braided imaginative connection to Ireland, or so it seems from her books. She writes of her birthplace as if immersed in the tricky current of its shifting cultural and political language, not to speak of Ireland's timeless sights and smells, the immemorial landscapes O'Brien captures as vividly as any Irish writer alive or dead.

Her latest novel, "Down by the River," addresses the worst of Ireland's waking nightmares -- a young girl made pregnant by a member of her own family and yet forbidden the mercy of an abortion, under church and Irish constitutional law.

O'Brien plunges us into the brutal events in the opening pages. A farmer, James McNamara, leads his young teenage daughter Mary to the remote bog land site where he assaults her, amid discarded garbage, weeds and foxgloves with "the big furry bees nosing in the cool speckled recesses of mauve and white bell." Mary has been expecting her father's attentions to come to this, and dreading it. "It does not hurt if you say it does not hurt," she thinks. "It does not hurt if you are not you."

Stage by stage, the novel maps out the consequences of the act. First comes further violation, then Mary's temporary escape to convent school, finally the discovery of her pregnancy and a gruesome, unsuccessful attempt at home abortion. Meanwhile, family life disintegrates.

O'Brien is unsparing in her portrayal of a rural community determined not to notice anything that might be untoward or likely to draw the wrong kind of newspaper headlines. No one wants to be the village snitch, and Mary is fortunate to find one neighbor, Betty Crowe, who cannot avert her face from the truth, and feels compelled to give the child a chance to escape a dreadful fate.

O'Brien's fictional tale of Mary MacNamara reflects a number of notorious cases in recent Irish history, amply debated in the Irish press. "Down by the River" takes us beyond even the finest journalism, not only in its hard-won conclusion, but in its insight on all the participants. O'Brien's account is as penetrating when it dramatizes the plush, devious lives of the judges in whose hands Mary's fate is placed, as it is when evoking the villagers among whom Mary is raised, or the incensed local policemen on the trail of commonplace but sickening perversion.

The book's greatest challenge is to admit us to the heart and mind of Mary and her father, James. O'Brien succeeds magnificently in both endeavors, enabling us to inhabit Mary's premature wisdom and her stunned alienation from herself. At the same time it takes us into the frantic, self-pitying soul of a father who has torn aside the constraints of parenthood. Both are unforgettable, heart-wrenching portraits.

No less memorable is O'Brien's refusal to let the harshness of her story infect her eye. She writes with a positively unfashionable descriptive richness and sensuousness of phrase.

In the countryside, "the mountains in the distance are soft and hazy, inverted moulds of varying purple . . . the fields with silage bags, crows satiny black, congregating and dispersing old, squat trees with waistcoats and jerkins of ivy around them. The big wide rivers a greeny brown and frothed in parts as if treacle has been stirred into them . . . " These observant, luxurious evocations are no mere set dressing. They alone, at times, carry our sense of hope for Ireland, for the characters in "Down by the River," for humanity at large. Such brave and beautiful writing gives us faith and reminds us, beyond any individual deeds of shame or courage, of what there is in the world to be loved and greeted with awe.

At a time when a spartan prose style is the approved reflection of a skeptical view of the world, O'Brien's glorious gift restores us to a sense of praise and gratefulness -- much needed to redeem "Down by the River's" grim foreground. As a novelist O'Brien has never been more psychologically acute than she is in this, her 19th book; as a lyrical stylist she is a match for anyone living, and a worthy heir to her great forebears in Irish literature.

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